“What?” I looked across the jungle of plants at him, so irritated with myself I could barely string together my thoughts. I’d been agitated all night, uneven, unsettled, all that shit. And now I was wickedly hungover to boot.
“The door,” Rory repeated patiently. “Did you find a door, in the fortress?”
I kept pacing. “What happened to the peace lilies?”
“Hmm?” He glanced up from his work. “Oh. I gave them all away. They’re poisonous to cats.”
Well, that was typical. He probably tended them with no intention of keeping them, gave them all away in prime shape to his friends and neighbors, the fucking mailman; anyone he thought might need some filtered air in their life.
“The door,” he pressed, looking at me expectantly. “Have you found it?”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “I found it.”
Rory actually looked surprised by that. And keenly interested.
I looked away.
“How do you feel about that?”
“I don’t know.” I sat down in a chair. “Confused, maybe. It’s disorienting, in a way. It wasn’t there before.”
“Can you picture it, now? In the wall of the fortress?”
“Yes.”
I could practically hear the gears in his head turning that over. He seemed way more optimistic about this discovery than I was. “Then I wonder… if there’s more than just the door? Other things that you haven’t noticed before?”
“Like what?”
“Like where does the door go?”
“It goes outside.”
Rory eyed me. He took off his gardening gloves and came to sit in a chair across from me, on the other side of the low table where Vivian had laid out tea for us. “Have you tried opening the door?”
“Yes.”
“And what do you see?”
I rubbed my jaw. “It’s… This is getting stupid.”
“What is?”
“This metaphor.”
He fixed me with his patient gaze. “It’s much more than a metaphor, Johnny.”
Yeah. I knew that.
The boy, the wall, the fortress, these had been key components of my therapy at one time. The only way I’d really ever been able to talk about any of it, as a kid; through the lens of the boy in the fortress.
It was still the only way I could talk about it, most days.
But I wasn’t sure yet that I liked that fucking door. It made me uncomfortable.
It made me feel out of control. Like the fortress was no longer my own.
And yeah, it made me feel stupid. Because how did I never see it before?
